The Farm Café and Workshops

Over the last few months we have been working with designer Lisa Nemetz on a new branding look and feel website for Clitterhouse Farm. As many of you know our company name is Our Yard, so we have decided to merge the names and going forward we will be Our yard at Clitterhouse Farm. You will see our new logo being used more regularly going forward and our shiny new website should be going live in the next month. In the meantime you'll still see a combination of Clitterhouse Farm Project and Our Yard being used. We'll share our new website when it's up and running. We think you'll love it and it will be a huge improvement on our existing site and branding. SAT 5TH JUNE - Come and have a grow with us! We would love to invite you to Clitterhouse Farm to shake off your lockdown blues at a family-friendly open day on June 5th, as part of the National Have A Grow Day celebration launched by UK charity Social Farms & Gardens and sponsored by Nature’s Path. Communities all over the UK will throw open the gates to welcome the public and showcase the amazing work we all do. All activities will be taking place outdoors and visitors should observe current Covid-19 social distancing guidelines. We look forward to seeing you! Ever wanted to try watercolour painting? Why don't you join Janine's Introduction to Watercolour Painting on the 5th of June? Immersed in nature, you will find inspiration in our colourful wildflower beds or the sensory herb garden to create a masterpiece! Janine is an inspiring local textile designer and artist and we are very excited to have her with us for the day. There will also be an opportunity to observe the incredibly talented illustrator Hannah Botma as she starts on a bespoke piece of art for the new cafe. If you are interested in delivering anything arts and crafts related please contact Tom or Kyanne at [email protected] The workshop will be outdoors and participants must observe current Covid-19 social distancing guidelines. Exciting new training opportunity with OneStoneGrove in partnership Our Yard a Clitterhouse Farm. From June 10th, we will be offering Accredited Community Organising Training through the new North West London Social Action Hub delivered by our very own Paulette Singer! Community Organising empowers people to build their own power and capacity, to create stronger and more sustainable communities which act together for the whole good of the community. We can give you the tools to implement these principles in your own communities to deliver projects. In this course, you will start to explore how people come together so that they can understand and take action on their concerns to build community and overcome social injustice What you'll learn: - What community organising is - The importance of listening to build relationships and explore issues - The power in communities and why it matters - What motivates people to act - How to take your next steps in community organising Thanks to generous funding we are able to offer this training at £10 for local Clitterhouse Farm residents (any barriers, just contact Sophia at [email protected]). Training is a one day course that starts at 9:30am-4:30pm that takes place at OneStoneGrove with lunch provided! This training will adhere to all Covid-19 regulations. Follow the link for more information and to buy a ticket! FARM GARDEN PLANT SALE - EVERY SATURDAY 10AM - 2PM If you'd like to join our garden team, we're on site every saturday morning 10am-2pm. Come along and say hello and get involved. We're a friendly bunch! We are always looking for new volunteers in our garden! If you are interested in gardening and have a passion for plants, we want to hear from you! Please contact us at [email protected] CAFE & GRUB CLUB - EVERY SATURDAY 10AM-2PM You will have noticed that we have been serving Grub Club from the cafe however there will still be a great deal of building work taking place before we are able to formally open to the public. We now have Volunteer It Yourself (volunteerityourself.org) working with young apprentices, partly funded by Sports England, who are helping us deliver disabled toilets and new workshop spaces. Workshops, hopefully, will be able to be rented out by September and if anyone is interested in workshop rental or volunteering at the new cafe - get in touch! All volunteers will be offered Level 2 Food and Hygiene and Barista Training. If you are interested in delivery or volunteering please contact [email protected]. Looking forward to seeing you at the farm soon The Farm Team!

As you know, work began last year with the demolition of the cafe, with works ceasing from August onwards due to bat mating season. Shortly afterwards we obtained generous support from Amey PLC in the form of a full drainage survey which got us ready to start work in early spring, but then... COVID. However, in positive news Amey came back on site in July and laid our cafe foundations which also coincided with the build of our new large greenhouse on the farm garden. This progress on the cafe front has enabled our contractors to start work on site and things are progressing nicely. Those that live nearby will have seen that the roof is largely already in place and the overall cafe is now taking shape. We are hoping for an October/November opening - as long as we don’t get any extra surprises! Despite the success of raising 100k for our Cafe expansion and Workshops back in December 2018 we have found ourselves in typical ‘Grand Designs’ style to be rather short of the actual costs. So far we have spent £9,000 in unexpected costs ranging from bat roost surveys through to emissions calculations reports, these unexpected costs have not ended and we are still paying out for things like noise surveys before we can satisfy planners and open the cafe. Despite having stripped back the cafe design to minimise on costs we are still around £40k short of what we need to also bring the workshops back into use. It turns out working on a derelict heritage site carries many more challenges and costs than we could have imagined or prepared for! Any donations you are able to make or support you could offer to help us either with some of the building work or to raise these much needed funds will be a lifeline for the project. If you can support in anyway please contact Paulette at [email protected] In other better news we had some success with funding bids we submitted at the beginning of lockdown. The funds raised will enable us to keep our garden open and maintained, run workshops from our new larger greenhouse onsite (see eventbrite links here:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/the-clitterhouse-farm-project-8445448187 ), support 12 local people to deliver online training and help us to upgrade our website so we can get information to you in a new and much improved format. If you have a particular skill or talent you would like to take online and offer to the community please get in contact with Paulette on: [email protected] Upcoming events to be aware of: Open House London on the 19th September: Once again this year we are participating in Open House London. This time we will be able to open up the cafe space to show you how our dream vision for the space is being made a reality, speak to the architects that both designed and are currently building the space, find out about the farm’s rich history and see some of the artefacts Hendon and District Archeologists have unearthed over the last 4 archeological digs onsite. Find out more about Open House and check out our listing here. Talk by Directors of Clitterhouse Farm Project will be at 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00pm: https://openhouselondon.open-city.org.uk/listings/8339 Fun Palace 3rd October: Every year thousands of people make Fun Palaces for their own local community – sharing skills, meeting new people, creating connections. This year our community will be joining with communities across the UK to create our own Fun Palace. To find out more head here: https://funpalaces.co.uk if you would like to get involved please contact either [email protected] or [email protected] check out and share our event page here and watch our schedule unfold: https://www.facebook.com/events/2042994009168494?post_id=2042994012501827&view=permalink¬if_id=1599220047470613¬if_t=page_post_reaction&ref=notif If you are interested in volunteering or supporting the project in anyway please do get in contact on [email protected] Thank you again for your continued understanding and support. Stay safe. The Farm Team PS. To keep up with our regular updates, check us out on social media: Twitter: www.twitter.com/clitterhouse Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/chfarm Instagram: www.instagram.com/clitterhousefarm

Dear supporters, Big apologies for another long delay since our last update. We had high hopes that the next one would be full of great news and updates on progress but alas our plans have been thwarted, this time by COVID-19. During the last update, we advised you about the longstanding drainage issues under the farm site which were preventing us from laying foundations. In some positive news, we can report that through pro bono support from Amey we have had a full survey and clearance of the entire drainage system and alongside some support from Local Tool Hire Company a repair was done to a collapsed drain - which finally means we are ready to lay our foundations. While the drainage issues were being dealt with, we also made great progress on finalising cafe designs and getting building control clearance to begin work. This whole process has been a new one for us, so it’s been a real learning journey. We have definitely been regularly comparing ourselves to an episode of Grand Designs, falling into the common trap of under budget and slipping timelines. Which is frustrating when many issues are outside of our control. Anyway, we were really hopeful that if the foundations went in by end of March, all things going well, we would have been ready for an early summer opening. However, as we all know the world has somewhat ground to a halt and unfortunately Amey who had kindly offered to lay our foundations have had to stop work for the time being. With full lockdown now in place, we have had to give in to the shared reality and accept that our cafe will take a little longer to complete. We realise this is disappointing but we will do everything we can to deliver the café as soon as possible. For full transparency, we also want you to know that the £50k contribution from the Mayor of London is paid in arrears so we are expected to spend £50k first. We are also unfortunately still waiting for some remaining crowdfund pledges to be released from PayPal and Barnet council. So the unlocking the pledges to pay for the build is an ongoing challenge. Whilst some of us have been busying ourselves on pushing the cafe build forward our incredible garden team have been working hard to build a whole new herbal and sensory garden, supported by a £2k grant from the Postcode Lottery. A week before the lockdown our wonderful community came together and worked miracles to ensure that the new garden area was near completion. Already we have seen more people stop by to observe the changes that are taking place and enjoy this space. This will be an incredible resource for our community both through this crisis and beyond (see pic attached). We’ve sadly had to pause our regular gardening sessions on Fridays and Saturdays with local schools and residents. Our team are still working hard maintaining our two garden spaces and preparing the second half of the farm garden for a new much larger greenhouse which will be used to deliver workshops to schools and the community. They are growing lots of produce and flowers for the growing season ahead. Some of which we will be selling as advertised on our twitter feed. If you are interested please get in touch with Patrick Kirwan our garden manager ([email protected]). He can arrange pick up outside the farm garden at a scheduled time ensuring that we are maintaining social distancing and keeping everyone safe and well. We’re hopeful that we will all be able to enjoy our garden spaces again in the coming months. We finished our Good Growth Feasibility study with architects RCKa in December and went straight into a submission process for the next round full Good Growth Fund application. Incredibly, we got through the first round of the process and were offered £1m in funding to work on a refurbishing a portion of the farm buildings. But as part of this process we had to secure a further £1m of match funding to unlock all of the funds. Unfortunately, although we’ve had very positive behind the scenes conversations we weren’t able to secure the match of £1m in time for the deadline. So, we have now been put in a pool of shortlisted projects and may still be eligible for funding if we can secure match funding in the next few months. Returning to the immediate challenge we’re all facing - for those of you that don’t know - one of overarching aims is to ‘build and support resilient and sustainable communities in and around NW London’. The question we have been asking ourselves is how do we continue to build connections and foster resilience in a time of crisis, moreover in a time of ‘social distancing’? We are a very small primarily volunteer-run organisation and in the absence of an indoor space to connect, we, like many others, are turning to the world of technology to bridge that gap. We are currently applying for a small grant to try and help us to capacity-build our volunteer pool to be able to run online meet-ups and training sessions. In short, we hope to take online some of the work we have been used to doing face to face. We have so many creative and talented people around us and we want to ensure that we can still support them to continue to share their skills with the community. In doing so we are hoping we can continue to connect with you all, indeed perhaps build new relationships that were previously not possible. We don’t know if we will be successful with this funding application so please do get in contact if you think you can help us make this happen. In addition to trying to take our offer online, we are looking at how we can ensure some of the most vulnerable amongst us get the support they need through this crisis and have joined our local UK Mutual Aid support group. It’s a simple model and has already reached hundreds of people needing support like food and prescription deliveries. By signing up onto this volunteer map http://signup.mutualaid.co.uk you can be contacted by a connector that will match you with local need. You can see who has already signed up in your area here: http://map.mutualaid.co.uk/ Unfortunately, in many areas we didn’t have time to leaflet before the lockdown and given many of our most vulnerable may not be online, the only way we can continue to spread the word is through you. If you are healthy and able please sign up to help out and if you need to stay at home please do your bit by sharing these links along with this email address for requesting help: [email protected] and this telephone number where people can request support: 020 31 377 488. Thank you again for your continued understanding and support. Stay safe. The Farm Team PS. To keep up with our regular updates, check us out on social media: Twitter: www.twitter.com/clitterhouse Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/chfarm Instagram: www.instagram.com/clitterhousefarm

Happy Halloween to all our supporters! It's been a while since we last updated you. But fear not, we have been very busy this summer. We hope lots of you were able to enjoy our many events and activities we held over the last few months - with great food, music, art, natural cosmetics workshops, intro to bee-keeping, apple pressing, furniture building, gardening, an Open House London event, and much more. In late August we demolished our old temporary cafe and began the groundwork for the new cafe space. Sadly, we have not been able to move as fast as we would have liked as we have discovered that some of the old drains under the building have collapsed and are going to involve significant unexpected costs and works to reinstate. We have had some pro-bono support from Amey to try and uncover what work needs to be done and we're still working our way through this, but we're hopeful we can get over this hurdle soon and start construction on the new space. Meanwhile, we have continued at pace with our Good Growth Fund Feasibility study and have gone through a detailed process of working out what the future of Clitterhouse Farm could look like. We will post the full report up on our website soon for you all to see, but we've attached a photo of one of the early proposed phases of work in this update for you to look at. Most recently we have been busy submitting a series of much larger funding applications to pay for the future phases of work and for the team to deliver it. If we get through the first rounds of these applications we will be working hard to build the case for support and to bring in the millions of pounds that we will need to bring the farm back into use. Exciting times! We will post another update soon with more details on our plans for the future and of course on how we're progressing with the cafe construction. Thank you again for all your continued support. The Farm Team

As many of you will have seen from our recent newsletters, we have finally been granted planning permission. Which is great news! It has been a much longer and more complicated process than we would have liked, but we have reached an important milestone. We're now working with our architects, the council, the Mayor of London and others to get moving on the demolition of our current pop up cafe and to start construction of the new cafe space and workshops. The demolition will be happening in August and construction will continue up to the end of 2019 and into early 2020. We will send out a separate update shortly with details of next steps and key dates. Thank you again to all of you for your support and patience with us as we navigated our way through the planning process. The exciting phase of building is to come!

Hi everyone Just a quick update for all the wonderful supporters of our Farm Cafe and Workshops crowdfund. 1. PLANNING APPLICATION: As we mentioned in our last update, we submitted our ecologist’s report on the bat roost in the farm buildings. On the basis of this report Barnet have given us some restrictions on the tools we can use during construction to limit any impact on the bats, but nothing that should severely impact the project. We expected that now the report has been accepted that a final decision would be made as to whether we could proceed with the construction, but unfortunately the planning team have come back to us with new questions regarding waste management for the expanded cafe. This has meant we have had to revise our drawings again, and these now have to be put back out for public consultation. We're unsure as to why we are getting these requests for further details only now (we first submitted our application in November 2018). Suffice to say, it is frustrating that it is taking so long to get a decision made and we are eager to get going. We very much appreciate all of your patience and rest assured we will let you know as soon as we have another update. [Your crowdfund pledges are all still held by Spacehive and won’t be released to us until we have planning permission.] 2. EXISTING CAFE: As many of you know, while we are waiting for the planning permission decision to be made, we have reopened our existing cafe and have been serving lovely teas and coffees and cakes. We are open Wednesdays 10am-12pm (Stay & Play) and 10am-2pm every Saturday. For half-term next week, we have an extended Stay & Play session at the café from 10am-2pm on Wednesday 30th May. We are also pleased to say that we are now accepting card payments! ☺ 3. GOOD GROWTH FUND - FEASIBILITY STUDY: In other news, we are making progress with the feasibility study and business planning funded by the Mayor of London Good Growth Fund. We have commissioned a great architecture practice called RCKa and we will be working closely with their team over the next few months on our strategy for bringing all of the buildings back into use and to ensure we have a bright and sustainable future ahead of us. As part of this work we will be engaging local people, Barnet council and the Brent Cross South regeneration team at Argent Related. This is an incredibly important piece of work and will enable us to articulate a compelling and sustainable future vision for the farm, backed up with research, drawings and a strong business case. 4. THE FARM GARDEN is going from strength to strength and as many of you will have seen, we have expanded beyond the garden gate into the section of the park just outside. This used to be just scrub, grass and a lot of rubbish, but thanks to the help of a wonderful team of volunteers and regular visits from GoodGym we've made great progress and the area is really starting to take shape. You may have noticed that we have even started experimenting growing strawberries, mange tout, tomatoes, corn and potatoes in over 50 hay bales! Do come by and visit us, get involved or just enjoy the space. The garden is open Mondays 10am-11am, Wednesdays 7-8pm (for volunteer induction), Friday 9am-11am and then 3-5pm, and Saturdays 10am-2pm. That's all for now. We will update you on the planning decision as soon as we hear. Hopefully it won't be long now. Do come by and visit our cafe and garden and let us know if you would like to get involved. We're always looking to expand our team. You can email us on [email protected] and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (links below). Thanks, The Farm Team www.clitterhouse.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/clitterhouse Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/chfarm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clitterhousefarm

Hi everyone!   Firstly, many apologies for the radio silence. The farm team have been busy and we have a few updates for you.   1.) Planning permission and the bats! We have now completed our bat survey and the ecology report has come back with some recommendations. The good news is the café should not impact any bats that are roosting in the farm buildings so this should not be a stumbling block for planning.  We’ve submitted the report to the Barnet planning department and we’re waiting to hear back about next steps. Hopefully, we will get permission in the next few weeks. 2.) Pledges: Most of you will have received email notifications from Spacehive over the last few weeks saying that they have deducted your pledges through PayPal and GoCardless. We know there are a few outstanding payments but most of the money should have been collected by now. The Farm Project has not received any of the monies yet as GoCardless and Paypal hold onto the pledges until planning permission has been granted. Once permission has been received the money will be transferred across to us and we can start to make headway in terms of commissioning a construction partner and buying materials. We will of course keep you posted on how things progress. 3.) Good Growth Fund. You may be interested to know, that we are in the process of commissioning a consultant to develop a feasibility study and strategic delivery plan for the wider farm site. This is being funded by the Mayor of London Good Growth Funding. This is a very important piece of work and will help build the case for our plans for the rest of the farm buildings. We will send you updates on this as and when we have them. 4.)Farm Garden: The garden is going from strength to strength and any of you have visited recently will have seen that we have made great progress with a new seating area and pergola and the spring bulbs are starting to bloom (see attached photo). We’re open Mondays 10-11am, Fridays, 9-11am (we have school groups between 11am-2.30pm) and Saturdays 10am-1pm. But please check social media (links below) for latest updates. We are always looking for new people who want to join the garden team so please email [email protected] if you’d like to find out how you can get involved. 5.)Existing café: As we are still waiting for planning permission to come through before we can begin construction on our expanded café, we have decided to temporarily reopen the existing café every Saturday from April onwards. If you are keen to support the running of café, either by becoming a trained barista, by donating home-baked goodies or have another skill to offer then please email Paulette on [email protected]    That’s all for now. We’ll endeavour to send out more regular updates and hopefully our next message will be telling you that planning permission has been approved. Thanks again for all your support and generosity. The Farm Team. www.clitterhouse.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/clitterhouse Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/chfarm